Murder and Misogyny: Making the Connection

Yesterday morning I was reading the headlines on Huffingtonpost.com and I came across one that I just had to click on.  The article was about the recent sentencing of Britain’s “crossbow cannibal”, a 40 yr. old former criminology PhD student who was convicted of murdering and then eating three women who worked as prostitutes in the northern city of Bradford.  As I was reading, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I had read this exact same story before.  Then I remembered the case of California’s “grim sleeper”.  It was just this summer that Lonnie David Franklin Jr. was arrested for the murders 11 women, some of whom also worked as prostitutes.  The murders all took place in South Los Angeles and began as early as 1985.

It seems these cases pop up every few years, where some depraved misogynist sets about randomly killing innocent women.  Canada’s brush with serial misogynistic murder came in 1989, when then-25 year old Marc Lépine shot 20 women, six of whom died, inside Montreal’s École Polytechnique.  Before opening fire, Lépine told one of his victims that he was carrying out the shooting because he was “fighting feminism”.

But cases like these clearly didn’t start in the 80’s.  A century earlier, an unknown assailant known to the public as “Jack the Ripper” terrorized the streets of London by brutally murdering at least five prostitutes.  It’s difficult to know exactly how and why predators like the grim sleeper and the crossbow killer choose the victims that they choose.  Surely prostitutes are among the most vulnerable due to their social isolation and the fact that they often walk the streets alone at night.  However, the apparent preference for prostitutes in so many cases suggests there’s something more to the story.

At the heart of these murders lies a deep-seated disdain for female sexuality.  By using their sexuality for commercial gain, these women exercise ultimate dominion over their own bodies, which is something a lot of men feel threatened by.  For these men, female sexuality exists for the benefit of men only, and should only be wielded by men and god.  The murder of prostitutes is the result of a confluence of this very common propensity, with a (fortunately) uncommon murderous pathology.